Juynboll Lecture: Towards connected histories of Muslim Qur’an translation
- Date
- Wednesday 20 November 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden
The First G.H.A Juynboll Lecture
The Juynboll foundation commemorates the life and work of Dr. Gautier Juynboll. It strives to promote the study of Arabic and Islam at Leiden university and to keep his legacy alive. This year the Juynboll association will organize a celebratory lecture to advance this goal.
Towards connected histories of Muslim Qur’an translation
Muslims have translated the Qur’an into Persian, Turkic, Malay or Kanembu for at least a thousand years in a variety of ways. Today, they translate the Qur’an in Bogotá and Cape Town, in Jakarta and Ankara, in Port Louis and Tokyo, into dozens of languages from all over the world. How can we connect the dots? How can we gain an understanding of global dynamics, patterns and connections in a discipline that has traditionally been defined by philological expertise, and hence privileged studies on corpora in a particular language? How can we transcend conventional center-periphery models without neglecting hierarchies based on religious authority and linguistic prestige? The study of Muslim Qur’an translation provokes questions that are relevant to the wider field of Islamic studies. This talk explores promising venues of research that will allow us to address these questions, providing insights into the multilingual discourses that shaped the Islamic tradition.
Speaker
The lecture will be given by Freiburg university's Prof. Dr. Johanna Pink. Whose research interests are mainly early modern and modern Qur‘anic exegesis, Qur‘an translations with a special focus on Indonesia, the status of non-Muslims in Muslim majority societies and religious discourses, and the recent history of Egypt.